01-11-2009, 02:38 PM
THE END OF DEMOCRACY
Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi
http://www.shaykhabdalqadir.com/content/...12009.html
To the great uneducated masses, democracy means universal franchise free to pick its governing institution divided into two or more opposing parties. The media instructed technical class also adhere to the creed that government should not interfere with the market – the market being corporation-controlled distribution and free markets meaning it is forbidden to inhibit global spread of corporation over private entity. Wealth is not governed. Wealth does not spend itself on people. The people pay for everything and are taxed for everything they buy or drive or fly.
Now the wealth system has collapsed, irretrievably and rationally. It is the people who are ordered to pay the billions required to restore wealth to the wealthy. This operation can only be accomplished by persuading the masses that in fact the operation is a rescue from poverty not a recipe of endebtment.
In Visconti’s film masterpiece of Lampedusa’s novel, ‘The Leopard’, the politics of power are laid bare. The underlying law of governance is defined: “For things to remain the same, everything must change.”
If the financial system has collapsed then it means the democratic system has collapsed, democracy’s function having been to separate government (controlling the masses) from ‘market’, that is, commodity wealth – money itself, while worthless intrinsically, having become a traded commodity.
By 2005 the monks of the banking/investment orders knew that the inescapable end-game of futures and hedge-fund systems was reaching mathematical meltdown. This meant that democracy needed a mandate for the masses which could offer hope, salvation, rescue and business as usual – in short, the dream would not die.
With superb expertise the stage was prepared for the dream-regime, the dream leader and the brilliant delusion of turning the end into the semblance of the beginning.
The ‘policy' of this renewal was only one word. Why not? Millions had died and been displaced in Iraq with only three letters – W.M.D.
The political mantra was announced: “Change.”
However, it may be that in the great nature of this upheaval it will not be ‘their’ business that is renewed – but rather, that the whole system, money and its personnel – will all be swept away. ‘Their’ change will not grant them a sameness.
The Second Hundred Years War that started with the politicisation of wealth in South Africa in 1910, (the ‘solution’ of Dominion), finally has come to an end.
It has been the era of the political class. The era of the rule by the servants of the banking elite who, not the universal franchise, empowered them.
No concocted mathematical (“economic”) rescue package can succeed – because the epoch of democratic governance cannot be rescued. Banking cannot work without democracy. However, the crisis in the political class is greater than that of finance.
Now we know that paper money does not function – we also know that democratic personnel do not function either. It is over. It is over. It is over.
Let us look out on the terrain.
In Kenya – two party politicians claim the Presidency. In order to win it they both let their own people slaughter each other by tens of thousands. It is still unresolved.
In Zimbabwe – a half-crazed President (“Zimbabwe is mine”) embodying socialist politics in pure form, battles the opponent, he in turn, the appointee of American investment. Their refusal to collaborate has produced million dollar inflation and a cholera epidemic with over 1000 dead.
In Bangladesh – two militant Begums battle for power, their policies identical – they have paralysed the country for a decade.
In Greece – two parties locked in conflict for two decades, the socialist Papandreou team cursing the monetarist Karamanlis team. Now Greece approaches civil war.
It should be noted that the party-system tends to produce an abortive monarchism sustaining a low DNA-structured leadership – Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes in the key Republican state.
Blatant non-functioning of the party system democracy is said to be because the country is immature, but that cannot be sustained when you regard the European Union.
Britain’s Prime Minister forced not only the country but the government itself into a war neither wanted. The present holder of the office has never been chosen by the electorate, that itself is a disgrace given the dictatorial powers achieved by his predecessor.
Blair was seriously in need of psycho-analysis. Brown is even more insecure as a Premier. He is almost totally blind. Visiting heads of state are asked not to offer their hands first in greeting as he may miss it. His corsets do not inspire confidence. His upper dentures do not meet his lower dentures. He has some mysterious disability which results in an uncontrollable dropping of his jaw. The pursed lips of his smile suggest job losses more than pleasure. From the fear dilated eyes of Blair to the blindness of Brown, however, the defining word is not ugliness. It is inadequacy. Democratic leaders are not fit for high office. This is now axiomatic. Inadequate. Brown – inadequate. Bush – inadequate. Merkel – inadequate. Zapatero – inadequate.
How does this inadequacy manifest?
Well! When the complete financial system and its institutions collapsed at the end of 2007 – the political leadership not only were surprised, they actually denied it at first. They openly stated they did not know HOW it had happened. They offered no solution. They adopted the bankers’ (the bankrupted bankers!) recommendation.
But there is a much graver inadequacy. The worst aspect of the political class is its cowardice, coupled with its supreme indifference to the slaughter of its own young men in useless wars.
The refusal of a government to go to the front-line in the event of a war, led by its President and first ministers, should result in their overthrow or national and military mutiny. They endlessly belittle the personal rule of the Monarch – but the Monarch led the war and so did not squander generations as Asquith, Lloyd George, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Blair and Bush have done. Killers and cowards. What more sickening sight in the world than Blair and Bush visiting Iraqi soldiers, or Brown visiting Afghanistan. No wonder the French soldier turned away from President Sarkozy as he laid medals on the coffins flown into Paris
AMERICA'S POLITICAL CANNIBALISM
Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/2008...nnibalism/
It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.
As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class, as the Democratic and Republican parties are exposed as craven tools of our corporate state, as savings accounts, college funds and retirement plans become worthless, as unemployment skyrockets and as home values go up in smoke, we must prepare for the political resurgence of a reinvigorated radical Christian right. The engine of this mass movement—as is true for all radical movements—is personal and economic despair. And despair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus commodities.
Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political system—which is a good description of the American government under George W. Bush. Polanyi wrote that a self-regulating market, the kind bequeathed to us since Ronald Reagan, turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market’s belief that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market. He reminded us that a society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the foundation for a continued prosperity.
We face an environmental meltdown as well as an economic meltdown. This would not have surprised Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University. Russia’s northern coastline has begun producing huge qualities of toxic methane gas. Scientists with the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008 describe what they saw along the coastline recently as “methane chimneys” reaching from the sea floor to the ocean’s surface. Methane, locked in the permafrost of Arctic landmasses, is being released at an alarming rate as average Arctic temperatures rise. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The release of millions of tons of it will dramatically accelerate the rate of global warming.
Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible, as Polanyi predicted, for our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species.
The corporate con artists and criminals who have hijacked our state and rigged our financial system still speak to us in the obscure and incomprehensible language coined by specialists at elite business schools. They use terms like securitization, deleveraging, structured investment vehicles and credit default swaps. The reality, once you throw out their obnoxious jargon, is not hard to grasp. Banks lent too much money to people and financial institutions that could not pay it back. These banks are now going broke. The government is frantically giving taxpayer dollars to banks so they can be solvent and again lend money. It is not working. Bank lending remains frozen. There are ominous signs that the government may not be able to hand over enough of our money because the losses incurred by these speculators are too massive. If credit markets remain in a deep freeze, corporations such as AT&T, Ford and General Motors might go bankrupt. The downward spiral could spread like a tidal wave across the country, especially since our corporate elite, including Barack Obama, seem to have no real intention of bailing out families who can no longer pay their mortgages or credit card debts.
Lenin said that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch its currency. If our financial disaster continues there will be a widespread loss of faith in the mechanisms that regulate society. If our money becomes worthless, so does our government. All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators amass millions. Look at Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld. He walks away from his bankrupt investment house after pocketing $485 million. His investors are wiped out. An economic collapse does not only mean the degradation of trade and commerce, food shortages, bankruptcies and unemployment; it means the systematic dynamiting of the foundations of a society. I watched this happen in Yugoslavia. I fear I am watching it happen here in the United States.
WHAT WENT WRONG IN THE CAPITALIST CASINO?
Tony Benn
The Tribune
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e21062.htm
"THE great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men. These men had only learned how to act in the interest of their own bureaucratically-run private monopolies which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic state, They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation."
These words are from the 1945 Labour manifesto Let Us Face The Future which brilliantly identified the very same crisis which is now described as a "credit crunch" as if it were a mere hiccup in an otherwise wonderful neo-liberal globalised world which could be corrected with a vast subsidy from the taxpayers to put the Wall Street casino and its partners worldwide back into profit. It reminded me of the fact that when slavery was abolished it was the slave owners, and not the slaves, who received compensation from the government of the day.
Perhaps more important - and never mentioned in the media - is that all the news we get every day and every hour is all about the bankers while presidents, prime ministers and other elected leaders of the world have been reduced to the role of mere commentators who are expected to supply taxpayers' money whenever it is needed to bail out the wealthy.
Indeed, what we are watching is nothing less than the steady transfer of real political power from the polling station to the market and from the ballot to the wallet - reversing the democratic gains we have made over the last century when we were able, increasingly, to use our votes to shape our economic future.
Our 1945 manifesto made that clear in the very next passage following the quote above. This is what it said: "The nation wants food, work and homes. It wants more than that. It wants good food in plenty, useful work for all and comfortable labour-saving homes that take full advantage of the resources of modern science and productive industry."
That was the policy that swept Labour MPs into power in 1945 and gave this country the National Health Service, the welfare state and a massive house building programme, made possible by elected local authorities who had the resources made available to them by the Treasury.
Now, 63 years later, we are back facing a similar situation and we need to understand why it has happened if we are to see our way forward.
We have been told every day by the media that we should put our faith in the market and that elected governments are the problem and not the answer and, for that reason, should not interfere.
These ideas began to emerge in the political mainstream when Margaret Thatcher came to power and in 1994 "new" Labour adopted them as the basis of its own approach which explains why she once described "new" Labour as her "greatest achievement".
Trade union rights are now more restricted than they were in 1906, wages have been held down and people have been advised to borrow and spend as an alternative - which explains why the stock market has fallen and locked more and more people into debt, which is a subtle form of slavery itself.
This is why so many people are frightened and frightened people can sometimes be persuaded to seek an answer by identifying an enemy who can be made a scapegoat for failure - as Hitler did when he blamed the Jews, the Communists and the trade unions for the mass unemployment in Germany and set up a fascist dictatorship which led to the Holocaust and war.
Hitler dealt with the unemployed by giving them jobs in the arms factories and the armed forces which led to the Second World War and the massive human cost it caused.
Whatever the left does it must never respond by splintering into a mass of tiny ideological sects forever fighting each other - for that way leads to failure, frustration and defeat.
This is the time for co-operation across the left to tackle the problems that face us on a non-sectarian basis as we have seen in the Stop the War Coalition, the campaigns for trade union rights, civil liberties, pensions, nuclear disarmament, council house building and a fair tax system - all of which require full trade union backing if they are to succeed.
If the economic situation gets worse, as it very well may, we have also to be on the look out for the "coalition" solution which could well be presented to us as the only way that these problems can be tackled, an argument that is being put forward now in America when George Bush, John McCain and Barack Obama rallied round to back the $700 billion bail-out that Wall Street demanded.
That same argument was used by Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 when he formed a National Government which nearly destroyed the Labour Party in the general election when only 51 Labour MPs survived and, without the courage of Ernie Bevin and the TUC, it might never have recovered, as it did in 1945.
I hope that the re-appointment of Peter Mandelson to the Cabinet in the latest reshuffle does not lead to that idea being re-floated as the best way to see us through the crisis for that could be the end of democracy - allowing the European Commission to prevent the re-emergence of public ownership and control of the banks which many will now see as the best way forward.
For the first time in my life, the public are to the left of a Labour government and common sense points us in a direction quite different from the one we have been following since 1979 when Thatcher set out to destroy the trade unions, cripple local authorities and privatise our public assets which we need now more than ever.
In 1945, the nation realised that the problems of peace required the same intensity of commitment as the problems of war.
And with the disastrous experience of Iraq and Afghanistan that argument, too, is beginning to register again and people are asking why we waste so much money on those illegal, brutal and unwinnable wars and on new nuclear weapons when people are losing their jobs and facing repossession of their homes.
The case for peace and socialism is intensely practical and, put like that, will command wide public and electoral support as it did then, in 1945, and could again do now.
Tony Benn, is one of Britain’s most distinguished politicians and the longest serving MP in the history of the Labour party
Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi
http://www.shaykhabdalqadir.com/content/...12009.html
To the great uneducated masses, democracy means universal franchise free to pick its governing institution divided into two or more opposing parties. The media instructed technical class also adhere to the creed that government should not interfere with the market – the market being corporation-controlled distribution and free markets meaning it is forbidden to inhibit global spread of corporation over private entity. Wealth is not governed. Wealth does not spend itself on people. The people pay for everything and are taxed for everything they buy or drive or fly.
Now the wealth system has collapsed, irretrievably and rationally. It is the people who are ordered to pay the billions required to restore wealth to the wealthy. This operation can only be accomplished by persuading the masses that in fact the operation is a rescue from poverty not a recipe of endebtment.
In Visconti’s film masterpiece of Lampedusa’s novel, ‘The Leopard’, the politics of power are laid bare. The underlying law of governance is defined: “For things to remain the same, everything must change.”
If the financial system has collapsed then it means the democratic system has collapsed, democracy’s function having been to separate government (controlling the masses) from ‘market’, that is, commodity wealth – money itself, while worthless intrinsically, having become a traded commodity.
By 2005 the monks of the banking/investment orders knew that the inescapable end-game of futures and hedge-fund systems was reaching mathematical meltdown. This meant that democracy needed a mandate for the masses which could offer hope, salvation, rescue and business as usual – in short, the dream would not die.
With superb expertise the stage was prepared for the dream-regime, the dream leader and the brilliant delusion of turning the end into the semblance of the beginning.
The ‘policy' of this renewal was only one word. Why not? Millions had died and been displaced in Iraq with only three letters – W.M.D.
The political mantra was announced: “Change.”
However, it may be that in the great nature of this upheaval it will not be ‘their’ business that is renewed – but rather, that the whole system, money and its personnel – will all be swept away. ‘Their’ change will not grant them a sameness.
The Second Hundred Years War that started with the politicisation of wealth in South Africa in 1910, (the ‘solution’ of Dominion), finally has come to an end.
It has been the era of the political class. The era of the rule by the servants of the banking elite who, not the universal franchise, empowered them.
No concocted mathematical (“economic”) rescue package can succeed – because the epoch of democratic governance cannot be rescued. Banking cannot work without democracy. However, the crisis in the political class is greater than that of finance.
Now we know that paper money does not function – we also know that democratic personnel do not function either. It is over. It is over. It is over.
Let us look out on the terrain.
In Kenya – two party politicians claim the Presidency. In order to win it they both let their own people slaughter each other by tens of thousands. It is still unresolved.
In Zimbabwe – a half-crazed President (“Zimbabwe is mine”) embodying socialist politics in pure form, battles the opponent, he in turn, the appointee of American investment. Their refusal to collaborate has produced million dollar inflation and a cholera epidemic with over 1000 dead.
In Bangladesh – two militant Begums battle for power, their policies identical – they have paralysed the country for a decade.
In Greece – two parties locked in conflict for two decades, the socialist Papandreou team cursing the monetarist Karamanlis team. Now Greece approaches civil war.
It should be noted that the party-system tends to produce an abortive monarchism sustaining a low DNA-structured leadership – Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes in the key Republican state.
Blatant non-functioning of the party system democracy is said to be because the country is immature, but that cannot be sustained when you regard the European Union.
Britain’s Prime Minister forced not only the country but the government itself into a war neither wanted. The present holder of the office has never been chosen by the electorate, that itself is a disgrace given the dictatorial powers achieved by his predecessor.
Blair was seriously in need of psycho-analysis. Brown is even more insecure as a Premier. He is almost totally blind. Visiting heads of state are asked not to offer their hands first in greeting as he may miss it. His corsets do not inspire confidence. His upper dentures do not meet his lower dentures. He has some mysterious disability which results in an uncontrollable dropping of his jaw. The pursed lips of his smile suggest job losses more than pleasure. From the fear dilated eyes of Blair to the blindness of Brown, however, the defining word is not ugliness. It is inadequacy. Democratic leaders are not fit for high office. This is now axiomatic. Inadequate. Brown – inadequate. Bush – inadequate. Merkel – inadequate. Zapatero – inadequate.
How does this inadequacy manifest?
Well! When the complete financial system and its institutions collapsed at the end of 2007 – the political leadership not only were surprised, they actually denied it at first. They openly stated they did not know HOW it had happened. They offered no solution. They adopted the bankers’ (the bankrupted bankers!) recommendation.
But there is a much graver inadequacy. The worst aspect of the political class is its cowardice, coupled with its supreme indifference to the slaughter of its own young men in useless wars.
The refusal of a government to go to the front-line in the event of a war, led by its President and first ministers, should result in their overthrow or national and military mutiny. They endlessly belittle the personal rule of the Monarch – but the Monarch led the war and so did not squander generations as Asquith, Lloyd George, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Blair and Bush have done. Killers and cowards. What more sickening sight in the world than Blair and Bush visiting Iraqi soldiers, or Brown visiting Afghanistan. No wonder the French soldier turned away from President Sarkozy as he laid medals on the coffins flown into Paris
AMERICA'S POLITICAL CANNIBALISM
Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/2008...nnibalism/
It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.
As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class, as the Democratic and Republican parties are exposed as craven tools of our corporate state, as savings accounts, college funds and retirement plans become worthless, as unemployment skyrockets and as home values go up in smoke, we must prepare for the political resurgence of a reinvigorated radical Christian right. The engine of this mass movement—as is true for all radical movements—is personal and economic despair. And despair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus commodities.
Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political system—which is a good description of the American government under George W. Bush. Polanyi wrote that a self-regulating market, the kind bequeathed to us since Ronald Reagan, turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market’s belief that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market. He reminded us that a society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the foundation for a continued prosperity.
We face an environmental meltdown as well as an economic meltdown. This would not have surprised Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University. Russia’s northern coastline has begun producing huge qualities of toxic methane gas. Scientists with the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008 describe what they saw along the coastline recently as “methane chimneys” reaching from the sea floor to the ocean’s surface. Methane, locked in the permafrost of Arctic landmasses, is being released at an alarming rate as average Arctic temperatures rise. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The release of millions of tons of it will dramatically accelerate the rate of global warming.
Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible, as Polanyi predicted, for our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species.
The corporate con artists and criminals who have hijacked our state and rigged our financial system still speak to us in the obscure and incomprehensible language coined by specialists at elite business schools. They use terms like securitization, deleveraging, structured investment vehicles and credit default swaps. The reality, once you throw out their obnoxious jargon, is not hard to grasp. Banks lent too much money to people and financial institutions that could not pay it back. These banks are now going broke. The government is frantically giving taxpayer dollars to banks so they can be solvent and again lend money. It is not working. Bank lending remains frozen. There are ominous signs that the government may not be able to hand over enough of our money because the losses incurred by these speculators are too massive. If credit markets remain in a deep freeze, corporations such as AT&T, Ford and General Motors might go bankrupt. The downward spiral could spread like a tidal wave across the country, especially since our corporate elite, including Barack Obama, seem to have no real intention of bailing out families who can no longer pay their mortgages or credit card debts.
Lenin said that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch its currency. If our financial disaster continues there will be a widespread loss of faith in the mechanisms that regulate society. If our money becomes worthless, so does our government. All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators amass millions. Look at Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld. He walks away from his bankrupt investment house after pocketing $485 million. His investors are wiped out. An economic collapse does not only mean the degradation of trade and commerce, food shortages, bankruptcies and unemployment; it means the systematic dynamiting of the foundations of a society. I watched this happen in Yugoslavia. I fear I am watching it happen here in the United States.
WHAT WENT WRONG IN THE CAPITALIST CASINO?
Tony Benn
The Tribune
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e21062.htm
"THE great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men. These men had only learned how to act in the interest of their own bureaucratically-run private monopolies which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic state, They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation."
These words are from the 1945 Labour manifesto Let Us Face The Future which brilliantly identified the very same crisis which is now described as a "credit crunch" as if it were a mere hiccup in an otherwise wonderful neo-liberal globalised world which could be corrected with a vast subsidy from the taxpayers to put the Wall Street casino and its partners worldwide back into profit. It reminded me of the fact that when slavery was abolished it was the slave owners, and not the slaves, who received compensation from the government of the day.
Perhaps more important - and never mentioned in the media - is that all the news we get every day and every hour is all about the bankers while presidents, prime ministers and other elected leaders of the world have been reduced to the role of mere commentators who are expected to supply taxpayers' money whenever it is needed to bail out the wealthy.
Indeed, what we are watching is nothing less than the steady transfer of real political power from the polling station to the market and from the ballot to the wallet - reversing the democratic gains we have made over the last century when we were able, increasingly, to use our votes to shape our economic future.
Our 1945 manifesto made that clear in the very next passage following the quote above. This is what it said: "The nation wants food, work and homes. It wants more than that. It wants good food in plenty, useful work for all and comfortable labour-saving homes that take full advantage of the resources of modern science and productive industry."
That was the policy that swept Labour MPs into power in 1945 and gave this country the National Health Service, the welfare state and a massive house building programme, made possible by elected local authorities who had the resources made available to them by the Treasury.
Now, 63 years later, we are back facing a similar situation and we need to understand why it has happened if we are to see our way forward.
We have been told every day by the media that we should put our faith in the market and that elected governments are the problem and not the answer and, for that reason, should not interfere.
These ideas began to emerge in the political mainstream when Margaret Thatcher came to power and in 1994 "new" Labour adopted them as the basis of its own approach which explains why she once described "new" Labour as her "greatest achievement".
Trade union rights are now more restricted than they were in 1906, wages have been held down and people have been advised to borrow and spend as an alternative - which explains why the stock market has fallen and locked more and more people into debt, which is a subtle form of slavery itself.
This is why so many people are frightened and frightened people can sometimes be persuaded to seek an answer by identifying an enemy who can be made a scapegoat for failure - as Hitler did when he blamed the Jews, the Communists and the trade unions for the mass unemployment in Germany and set up a fascist dictatorship which led to the Holocaust and war.
Hitler dealt with the unemployed by giving them jobs in the arms factories and the armed forces which led to the Second World War and the massive human cost it caused.
Whatever the left does it must never respond by splintering into a mass of tiny ideological sects forever fighting each other - for that way leads to failure, frustration and defeat.
This is the time for co-operation across the left to tackle the problems that face us on a non-sectarian basis as we have seen in the Stop the War Coalition, the campaigns for trade union rights, civil liberties, pensions, nuclear disarmament, council house building and a fair tax system - all of which require full trade union backing if they are to succeed.
If the economic situation gets worse, as it very well may, we have also to be on the look out for the "coalition" solution which could well be presented to us as the only way that these problems can be tackled, an argument that is being put forward now in America when George Bush, John McCain and Barack Obama rallied round to back the $700 billion bail-out that Wall Street demanded.
That same argument was used by Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 when he formed a National Government which nearly destroyed the Labour Party in the general election when only 51 Labour MPs survived and, without the courage of Ernie Bevin and the TUC, it might never have recovered, as it did in 1945.
I hope that the re-appointment of Peter Mandelson to the Cabinet in the latest reshuffle does not lead to that idea being re-floated as the best way to see us through the crisis for that could be the end of democracy - allowing the European Commission to prevent the re-emergence of public ownership and control of the banks which many will now see as the best way forward.
For the first time in my life, the public are to the left of a Labour government and common sense points us in a direction quite different from the one we have been following since 1979 when Thatcher set out to destroy the trade unions, cripple local authorities and privatise our public assets which we need now more than ever.
In 1945, the nation realised that the problems of peace required the same intensity of commitment as the problems of war.
And with the disastrous experience of Iraq and Afghanistan that argument, too, is beginning to register again and people are asking why we waste so much money on those illegal, brutal and unwinnable wars and on new nuclear weapons when people are losing their jobs and facing repossession of their homes.
The case for peace and socialism is intensely practical and, put like that, will command wide public and electoral support as it did then, in 1945, and could again do now.
Tony Benn, is one of Britain’s most distinguished politicians and the longest serving MP in the history of the Labour party